"Montesquieu" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... XV. During this reign the nation continued on the decline. He was followed by his grandson, Louis XVI., a better man than his immediate predecessor, but too weak to carry out the reforms necessary to restore the prosperity of the nation. Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and many other writers, as well as the influence of the American Revolution, had fostered democratic ideas among the people, for the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... that they would have to establish civil government there. So he made up an excellent collection of books,—De Lolme on the British Constitution; Montesquieu on Laws; Story, Kent, John Adams, and all the authorities here; with ten copies of his own address delivered before the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society of Podunk, on the "Abnormal Truths of Social Order." He ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... Greeks, we find Hippocrates holding that all regions liable to violent changes of climate produced men of fierce, impetuous and stubborn disposition. "In approaching southern countries," says Montesquieu, "one would believe that morality was being left behind; more ardent passions multiply crimes; each tries to gain from others all the advantages which can minister to these passions." Buckle believes that the interruption of work caused by instability of climate leads to instability of ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... Montesquieu used to say that he had never known a pain or a distress which he could not soothe by half an hour of a good book.—JOHN ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... already gone so far, that Townshend brought Chesterfield over from the Hague, last Autumn;—a Baron de Montesquieu, with the ESPRIT DE LOIS in his head, sailed with Lord Chesterfield on that occasion, and is now in England "for two years;"—but Chesterfield could not be made Secretary; industrious Duke of Newcastle ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... that great instrument. They not only knew that common law, but they had studied closely the political history of Greece and Rome, and were familiar with the principles of government as set forth by Montesquieu and Adam Smith. ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... Mr. Godwin) "from Judge Blackstone of a geometrical progression would much more naturally apply to Montesquieu's hypothesis of the depopulation of the world, and prove that the human species is hastening fast to extinction, than to the purpose for which Mr. Malthus has employed it. An ingenious sophism might be raised upon it, to shew that the race of mankind ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... general crash and breaking up. No laws, he reasoned, could be made because there were no means by which the general will could express itself, such was the rigidity of absolutism and feudalism. The splendid studies of Montesquieu, which revealed to the French the eternal truths underlying the constitutional changes in England, had enlightened and captivated the best minds of his country, but they were too serious, too cold, too dry to move the quick, bright temperament of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... the pole circulates but slowly, the heart beats but languidly; consequently the married live chastely, the women almost require compulsion to take upon them the troubles of a married life," etc. Nearly the same idea expressed by Montesquieu, and repeated by Byron in "happy the nations of the moral North," are statements so at variance with our experience that this fact must alone excuse a reference to the subject. So far are they from ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... Montesquieu, notwithstanding his very superior knowledge, accuracy, and acuteness, enlarges upon this subject; and never takes any notice of the corrupt, mercenary, and degraded state into which Rome fell when it became as ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair
... difficulty dragged to the daylight, are expiring beneath the general reprobation; it is suspected that the government of society must be learned no longer from an empty ideology, after the fashion of the Contrat social, but, as Montesquieu foresaw, from the RELATION OF THINGS; and already a Left of eminently socialistic tendencies, composed of savants, magistrates, legists, professors, and even capitalists and manufacturers,—all born representatives and defenders of privilege,—and of a million of adepts, is forming in the ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... the ancient Persians say: "If you would be holy instruct your children, because all the good acts they perform will be imputed to you."—MONTESQUIEU. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... number of troops that may be brought into the field in times of great emergency is, of course, much greater than can be supported during a long war, or as a part of a permanent military establishment. Montesquieu estimates that modern nations are capable of supporting, without endangering their power, a permanent military force of about one-hundredth part of their population. This ratio differs but little from that of the present military establishments ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... accomplished stupendous enterprises as long as the victories of the sultans were the triumphs of the Mohammedan faith. In the present age they are in rapid decay, because their religion is departing, and despotism only remains. Montesquieu, who attributed to absolute power an authority peculiar to itself, did it, as I conceive, undeserved honor; for despotism, taken by itself, can produce no durable results. On close inspection we shall find that religion, and not fear, has ever been the cause of the long-lived prosperity of ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... the one which would favour this sovereign hope. Is it reason and opinion, or some innate character which governs the actions of men? The philosophers of hope answer "opinion," for opinion can be indefinitely changed and led from prejudice to science. Is it climate (as Montesquieu had urged) or political institutions which differentiate the races of men? Clearly it is institutions, for if it were climate there would be nothing to hope from reform. Burke opposed to all their schemes of construction and destruction, to their generalisations ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... or the Governor of the Universe were dethroned, it would be impossible to prevent a great uprising of the human conscience against a system, the legislation relating to which, in the words of so calm an observer as De Tocqueville, the Montesquieu of our laws, presents "such unparalleled atrocities as to show that the laws of humanity have been totally perverted." Until the infinite selfishness of the powers that hate and fear the principles of free government swallowed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... principal countries of Europe,—Montesquieu's assertion is now verified, that "only great nations can have large armies,"—the commission met everywhere proper facilities for observation. McClellan made full notes upon the spot, procured all the books of Tactics, Regulations, Military Laws, etc., and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... prophetic voices about America, differing in character and importance, but all having one augury, and opening one vista, illimitable in extent and vastness. Farewell to the idea of Montesquieu, that a republic can exist ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... day, and when wearied with the study of the law, he would recreate himself with philosophy and the study of the mathematics. Hume wrote thirteen hours a day while preparing his 'History of England.' Montesquieu, speaking of one part of his writings, said to a friend, "You will read it in a few hours; but I assure you it has cost me so much labour that ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... have supplied facts for such a work as that of Montesquieu? He indeed has been, perhaps justly, charged with abusing this advantage, by the undistinguishing adoption of the narratives of travellers of very different degrees of accuracy and veracity. But if we reluctantly confess the justness of this objection; if we are compelled to own that he ...
— A Discourse on the Study of the Law of Nature and Nations • James Mackintosh
... expounder and advocate of the Constitution, as then proposed and afterward ratified, with all its Federal and State-rights features. In the ninth number of that remarkable series of political essays, he quotes, adopts, and applies to the then proposed Constitution, Montesquieu's description of a "CONFEDERATE REPUBLIC," a term which ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... go on. Where single women are licentious, you rarely find faithful married women.' BOSWELL. 'And yet we are told that in some nations in India, the distinction is strictly observed.' JOHNSON. 'Nay, don't give us India. That puts me in mind of Montesquieu, who is really a fellow of genius too in many respects; whenever he wants to support a strange opinion, he quotes you the practice of Japan or of some other distant country, of which he knows nothing. To support polygamy, he tells ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... Orient; the number of adepts was more than 100,000. The first events of 1789 were only Masonry in action. All the revolutionaries of the Constituent Assembly were initiated into the third degree. We place in this class the Duc d'Orleans, Valence, Syllery, Laclos, Sieyes, Petion, Menou, Biron, Montesquieu, Fauchet, Condorcet, Lafayette, Mirabeau, Garat, Rabaud, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... king, during the wars of the Fronde. These were the people of whom he treasured up the smallest memorial, of whom he loved to hear the most trifling anecdote, and for whose likenesses he would have given any price. Of the great French writers of his own time, Montesquieu is the only one of whom he speaks with enthusiasm. And even of Montesquieu he speaks with less enthusiasm than of that abject thing, Crebillon the younger, a scribbler as licentious as Louvet and as dull as Rapin. A man must be ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the history of the fall of the Roman Empire, it is impossible to overlook the evil that the Chustions, so admirable in the desert, did the state when they were in power. "When I think," said Montesquieu, "of the profound ignorance into which the Greek clergy plunged the laity, I am obliged to compare them to the Scythians of whom Herodotus speaks, who put out the eyes of their slaves in order that nothing ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... criticising everything, analyzing everything, believing nothing. Voltaire was in the midst of it, hating, with all his vehement soul, the abuses that swarmed about him, and assailing them with the inexhaustible shafts of his restless and piercing intellect. Montesquieu was showing to a despot-ridden age the principles of political freedom. Diderot and D'Alembert were beginning their revolutionary Encyclopaedia. Rousseau was sounding the first notes of his mad eloquence,—the wild revolt of a ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... precisely into those errors of the raison raisonnante, about which, in his description of the intellectual preparation of the great overthrow, he has said so many just and acute things. Nothing can be more really admirable than M. Taine's criticism upon Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, as great masters of language (pp. 339-361). All this is marked by an amplitude of handling, a variety of approach, a subtlety of perception, a fulness of comprehension, which give a very ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 8: France in the Eighteenth Century • John Morley
... according to their etymology, being both from 'discerno,' they signify the power of so seeing things that in the seeing we distinguish and separate them one from another. [Footnote: L'esprit consiste a connaitre la ressemblance des choses diverses, et la difference des choses semblables (Montesquieu). Saint-Evremond says of a reunion of the Precieuses at the Hotel Rambouillet, with a raillery which is not meant to be disrespectful— 'La se font distinguer les fiertes des rigueurs, Les dedains des mepris, les tourments des langueurs; On y sait demeler ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... practiced upon in different countries and ages, and has received the sanction of the most approved writers on the subject of politics. The opponents of the plan proposed have, with great assiduity, cited and circulated the observations of Montesquieu on the necessity of a contracted territory for a republican government. But they seem not to have been apprised of the sentiments of that great man expressed in another part of his work, nor to have adverted ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... oppressor and the slave; Cruelty the product of arbitrary power; Testimony of Thomas Jefferson; Judge Tucker; Presbyterian Synod of South Carolina, and Georgia; General William H. Harrison; President Edwards; Montesquieu; Wilberforce; Whitbread; Characters. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... emotions seemed to have made crevices in that solidly constructed face which the pickaxe of poverty was daily enlarging. The mouth was eloquent and grave; in that feature Don Quixote was complicated with Montesquieu's president. ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... Montesquieu-Avantes Cave, about six miles from Saint-Girons, have brought to light a hearth covered over with a layer of stalagmite; numerous fragments of human bones, crania, femora, tibiae, humeri, and radii were found in this layer, and in that of the subjacent clay. In many ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... ear attentive; the subject is a la mode, and those who laugh are as great votaries of the science as any others are. This should satisfy you. Do you remember too, that the greatest men have sometimes written books on very trivial subjects,-Montesquieu, for example. [Footnote: M. de Monjucla, known as the author of an excellent history of mathematics, made a Dictionary of Gourmand Geography; he showed me portions of it during my residence at Versailles. It is said that M. Berryat-Professor of legal practice, has written a romance in ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... are its boundaries? What model or example had the framers of the Constitution in their minds, when they spoke of "executive power"? Did they mean executive power as known in England, or as known in France, or as known in Russia? Did they take it as defined by Montesquieu, by Burlamaqui, or by De Lolme? All these differ from one another as to the extent of the executive power of government. What, then, was intended by "the executive power"? Now, Sir, I think it perfectly ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... veto, and secondly by an implied power in the Judiciary to annul Congressional or State legislation, not on the grounds of policy, but on the sole ground of inconsistency with the paramount law of the Constitution. In this adjustment, the influence of Montesquieu was evident. ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... the politician, and of love to the philanthropist. Its literature too, in two branches, viz. political inquiry, and, towards the middle of the century, romance, offered subjects for imitation. Montesquieu studied the former; Rousseau and Diderot the latter. But England furnished also a series of fearless inquirers on the subject of religion, whose works became the subject of study and of translation.(514) Voltaire spent three years of exile in England,(515) at the time when the ferment existed ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... he began to build a fleet of beautiful ships for the China and India trade, their names, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Voltaire, and Rousseau, revealing his ideas of religion and liberty. So successfully did he combine banking and shipping that in 1813 he was believed to be the wealthiest merchant in the United States. ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... Montesquieu infers that the law which permits polygamy is physically conformable to the climate of Asia. The season of female beauty precedes that of their reason, and from its prematurity soon decays. The empire of their charms is short. It is therefore natural, the president ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... revolutionary ideas, which were unsettling men's minds. This was no less the case in the Netherlands than elsewhere; and the American revolt was regarded as a realisation and vindication in practical politics of the teaching of Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau, whose works were widely read, and of the Englishmen Hume, Priestley and Richard Price. Foremost among the propagandists of these ideas were Jan Dirk van der Capellen tot de Pol, a nobleman of Overyssel, and the three burgomasters of Amsterdam, ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... in simplicity a child," nothing gloomy, narrow, or pharisaical entered into the composition of Eugene Field. Like Jack Montesquieu Bellew, the editor of the Cork Chronicle, "his finances, alas! were always miserably low." This followed from his learning how to spend money freely before he was forced to earn it laboriously. He ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... says Montesquieu, ought to have the right to vote. Under such a rule I suppose my learned opponent would contend that a woman could not be an inhabitant, of course. I feel that I ought to apologize for presenting this point to this extent; it is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... looked down upon him from the walls. Produce a volume of Plato or of Shakespeare, he says somewhere, or 'only remind us of their names,' and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. That is the scholar's speech. Opening a single essay at random, we find in it citations from Montesquieu, Schiller, Milton, Herodotus, Shelley, Plutarch, Franklin, Bacon, Van Helmont, Goethe. So little does Emerson lend himself to the idle vanity of seeking all the treasures of wisdom in his own head, or neglecting the hoarded authority of the ages. It is true that he held ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... wrote Lucanus, "is the German's birthright." And Florus, speaking of liberty, said: "It is a privilege which nature has granted to the Germans, and which the Greeks, with all of their arts, knew not how to obtain." At a later period Montesquieu was led to exclaim: "Liberty, that lovely thing, was discovered in the wild forests of Germany." While Hume, viewing the results of this discovery, said: "If our part of the world maintains sentiments of liberty, honor, equity, and valor superior to the rest of mankind, it owes these ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... abbe Dubos, who, with less genius than his successor Montesquieu, has asserted and magnified the influence of climate, objects to himself the degeneracy of the Romans and Batavians. To the first of these examples he replies, 1. That the change is less real than apparent, and that the modern Romans prudently ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... exposition and the intrusion of astrological arguments, it is a new step in the study of universal history. [Footnote: Climates and geography. The fullest discussion will be found in the Republique, Book v. cap. i. Here Bodin anticipated Montesquieu. There was indeed nothing new in the principle; it had been recognised by Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and other Greeks, and in a later age ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... acts of our ancestors, we have a right to bring them to the standard of the political science of their age, but we have no right to bring them to the higher standard of our own. Montesquieu could give them but an imperfect clue to the labyrinth in which they found themselves involved; and yet no one had seen farther into the mysteries of social and political organization than Montesquieu. Hume had scattered brilliant rays on dark places, and started ideas which, once at work in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... Raynal, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, have treated of Paraguay under Jesuit rule, but their writings are founded on hearsay evidence. A German, Father Dobrizhoffer, stands alone.* His delightful 'History of the Abipones, an Equestrian People ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... without one. Nor will any degree of power in the hands of government, prevent insurrections. In England, where the hand of power is heavier than with us, there are seldom half a dozen years without an insurrection. In France, where it is still heavier, but less despotic, as Montesquieu supposes, than in some other countries, and where there are always two or three hundred thousand men ready to crush insurrections, there have been three in the course of the three years I have been here, in every one of which greater numbers were engaged than in Massachusetts, ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... Montesquieu made these political ideas of Locke the common property of Europe.[1] Rousseau did a like service for Locke's pedagogical views, given in the modest but important Thoughts concerning Education, 1693. The aim of education should not be to instill anything ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... admired weapon from its resting-place, proceeded to lecture on its virtues, its antiquity, and its beauty. Vivian seized this opportunity of taking a rapid glance at the contents of the library. He anticipated interleaved copies of Machiavel, Vattel, and Montesquieu; and the lightest works that he expected to meet with were the lying memoirs of some intriguing cardinal or the deluding apology of an exiled minister. To his surprise, he found that, without an exception, the collection consisted of poetry and romance. Somewhat surprised, ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... the indirect influences on his early culture, we see that the reform literature of that time was coming almost entirely from France. Active, earnest men everywhere were grasping the theories and phrases of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu, to wield them against every tyranny. Terrible weapons these,—often searing and scarring frightfully those who brandished them,—yet there was not one chance in a thousand that any man who had once made any considerable number ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... a constitution which may satisfy the wants and appease the prejudices then actually existing. In spite of such miscalculations as beset all forecasts of the future, they show admirable good sense and clear appreciation. But when they think it necessary to appeal to Montesquieu, to tag their arguments from common sense with little ornamental formulae learnt from philosophical writings, they show a very amiable simplicity; but they also seem to me to sink at once to the level of a clever prize essay in a ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... us what Michael Angelo said, how Plutarch felt, how Montesquieu thought about the question, and then glances off from it to the terror of the child at the thought of life without end, to the story of the two skeptical statesmen whose unsatisfied inquiry through a long course of years he holds to be ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... a Persian of Montesquieu, a Huron of Voltaire, even a simple Peruvian woman of Madame de Graffigny, reasons much more wisely about European civilization than an American of San Francisco. The fact is, that it is not sufficient to have wit, or even natural taste, in order ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... phraseology of Montesquieu was the result of long meditation. His words, as light as wings, bear on ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... leading article is nobody, and the chap that speaks in the House of Commons is a hero. Lord, Lord, how the world is 'umbugged! Pop'lar representation! what IS pop'lar representation? Dammy, it's a farce. Hallo! this article is stole! I remember a passage in Montesquieu uncommonly like it. [Goes and gets the book. As he is standing upon sofa to get it, and sitting down to read it, MISS PRIOR and the Children have come in at the garden. Children pass across stage. ...
— The Wolves and the Lamb • William Makepeace Thackeray
... could teach him many unusual lessons. He kept his eyes open everywhere, all his life long, on men and things and books. He recommended his friend. Captain Rickson, who was then in Halifax, to read Montesquieu's not yet famous book The Spirit of Laws, because it would be useful for a government official in a new country. Writing home to his mother from Louisbourg about this new country, that is, before Canada had become ...
— The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf • William Wood
... Plato, Horace and Richard Baxter, Petronius Arbiter and Blaise Pascal, Ulric von Huetten and Boileau, Hurdis and Hurd, Dr. Arnold and Montaigne, Harris of Salisbury and his famous uncle, Burke and "John Buncle," Montesquieu and Sir Philip Sidney, Dr. Johnson and the two Wartons, George Gascoyne and Spenser's friend Gabriel Harvey, Puttenham and Webbe, George Herbert and George Sand, Petrarch and Pinciano, Vida and Julius Caesar Scaliger, Pontanus and Savage Landor, Leigh Hunt and Quinctilian, or Tacitus ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... is likely to be underestimated. Says Montesquieu, "Liberty consists in security. This security is never more attacked than in public and private accusations. It is, therefore, upon the excellence of the criminal laws that chiefly the liberty of the citizen depends." And Lieber, in his very able work on Civil Liberty and Self-Government, ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary
... her attendant, obsequiously bearing her shawl upon his arm, to spread it over her shoulders in case it should be needed. Ambassadors and ministers she summoned before her, assuming that air of royalty which she had purchased with her merchantable charms. Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, waited in her ante-chambers, and implored her patronage. The haughty mistress became ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... of courage—moral, financial and physical. When his ship, the "Montesquieu," arrived at the mouth of the Delaware on March Twenty-sixth, Eighteen Hundred Thirteen, she was headed off and captured by an English gunboat. Word was sent to Girard that he could have his boat by bringing an inventory of the craft and cargo ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... in the first respectable-looking man from the street, and prove to him that literary study tends, as Bacon requires, "to civilize the life of man"; prove to him that, as Montesquieu requires, it "increases the excellence of our nature, and makes an understanding being yet more understanding," and the man—type though he may be of the modern practical age—will admit your claim and ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... Africa marvels why men, who, as Dahome shows, can affect a tasteful simplicity, will make themselves such "guys." When looking at these caricatures, he is tempted to read (literally) learned Montesquieu, "It is hardly to be believed that God, who is a wise being, should place a soul, especially a good soul, in such a black, ugly body," and to consider the few exceptions as mere "sporting plants." But the negro combines ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... constitutional treatises bearing on history, e.g., Bryce's American Commonwealth; Ostrogorski's Democracy and The Party System; Montesquieu's The ...
— A Guide to Methods and Observation in History - Studies in High School Observation • Calvin Olin Davis
... this matter or that, which he held to be unworthy of his character and reputation. He went so far as actually to decline to print in the Mercure a letter in which the writer in some fit of spleen placed Montesquieu below D'Aguesseau. 'My attachment,' he says, 'bids me say what will be best for you, and not what might please you most. If I loved you less, I should not have the courage to thwart you. I am aware of your grievances ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 3: Condorcet • John Morley
... this, her reading at this epoch was without any order or method. She read everything voraciously, mixing all the philosophers up together. She read Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bossuet, Pascal, Montaigne, but she kept Rousseau apart from the others. She devoured the books of the moralists and poets, La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare. All this reading was too much for her and ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... is to reconstruct the work of the great lawgivers of Hellas in a literary form. They partake both of an Athenian and a Spartan character. Some of them too are derived from Crete, and are appropriately transferred to a Cretan colony. But of Crete so little is known to us, that although, as Montesquieu (Esprit des Lois) remarks, 'the Laws of Crete are the original of those of Sparta and the Laws of Plato the correction of these latter,' there is only one point, viz. the common meals, in which they can be compared. Most of Plato's provisions resemble the laws and customs which prevailed in these ...
— Laws • Plato
... unfeigned modesty of the man who, his every public utterance having been dragged out of him by external compulsion, retains his native shyness and is alone in ignorance of his own influence. "No, no, it is Montesquieu, it is Dohm, it is my dear Lessing. Poor fellow, the Christian bigots are at him now like a plague of stinging insects. I almost wish he hadn't written Nathan der Weise. I am glad to reflect I didn't instigate him, nay, that he had written a play ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... and these letters were, after a short time (1760), written in the character of a Chinese who had come to study European civilisation. It may be noted that Goldsmith had in the Monthly Review, in mentioning Voltaire's memoirs of French writers, quoted a passage about Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes as follows: "It is written in imitation of the Siamese Letters of Du Freny and of the Turkish Spy; but it is an imitation which shows what the originals should have been. The success ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... towards England, and in the continental system, which resulted from that hatred. This gigantic system, which oppressed all Europe, could not fail to raise the entire continent against Napoleon and France, and thus to bring on the ruin of both. "Rome," as it is said by Montesquieu, "extended her empire because her wars only followed in succession. Each nation, such was her inconceivable good fortune, waited till another had been conquered, before beginning the attack." Rome fell as soon as all the nations assailed and ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. I • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... they only differ in their mode of expression. Their methods are also different: Hobbes relies on sophism; Grotius relies on the poets; they are agreed in everything else. In modern times the only man who could have created this vast and useless science was the illustrious Montesquieu. But he was not concerned with the principles of political law; he was content to deal with the positive laws of settled governments; and nothing could be more different than these two branches ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... and that which is to come. Think how many families have been plunged by it in beggary, and overwhelmed by it in vice. Think how many persons have become liars at the gaming table; how many perjured; how many drunkards; how many blasphemers; how many suicides. 'If Europe,' said Montesquieu, 'is to be ruined, it will be ruined by gaming.' If the United States are to be ruined, gaming in some of its forms will be a very efficient ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott
... I should rather say the Marchioness of Boscofolto, since the Duke has just bestowed on her the fief of that name, is impatient to make your acquaintance; and since you doubtless remember the saying of the Marquis de Montesquieu, that to know a ruler one must know his confessor and his mistress, you will perhaps be glad to seize both opportunities ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... monarch enlightened, constitutional, and pacific. He values solid gains more than showy magnificence; and knowing the use of astuteness, he knows also the importance of good faith. He has a sense of the balance of European power, and anticipates Montesquieu in his theory of the influence of climates on peoples. There is something of pity, something of irony, in the view which he takes of the joyless lot of the great ones of the earth. Having ascertained how few of the combinations of events can be controlled by the wisest calculation, he takes refuge ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... heart in politics; but if history teaches anything, it teaches that human progress is possible only because the benevolent instincts of the heart are permanent, while the reasonings of the head are shifting. "When God," says Montesquieu, "endowed human beings with brains, he did not intend to guaranty them." And the sarcasm of the French philosopher is fully justified, when we reflect that nothing mean, base, or cruel has ever been done in this world, which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... "Man," writes Montesquieu, "is described as a sociable animal." From this point of view it appears to me that the Frenchman may be called more of a man than others; he is first and foremost a man, since he seems especially made ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... which a husband should put into practice, if he wishes to escape mistakes in ruling his little kingdom. Nevertheless, in spite of what was decided by the minority at the council of Macon (Montesquieu, who had perhaps foreseen the coming of constitutional government has remarked, I forget in what part of his writings, that good sense in public assemblies is always found on the side of the minority), we discern in a woman a ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... which," he said, "were singular anomalies of our system, having grown out of that error in our constitution which confers upon the legislative assemblies the power of declaring war, which, in the theory of government, according to Montesquieu and Rousseau, is strictly an executive act. But, as we have made it legislative, whenever secrecy is necessary for an operation of the executive involving the question of peace and war, Congress must pass ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... 410,—the interest was reduced to one half per cent. under the consulate of Lucius Manlius Torquatus and Caius Plautius;—as may be seen by referring to the seventh book (16, 27) of Livy,—or still better, the clear exposition of this error by Montesquieu in the 22nd chapter of the 22nd book of his "Esprit des Loix." The author of the Annals is then only right when stating that originally the interest was one per cent. per annum, and afterwards reduced to half that amount. In everything else he blunders to an extent that is inexplicable in an ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... accidents with us, as with our prototypes. And so we come to their style of weapon. Our army sword is the short, stiff, pointed gladius of the Romans; and the American bowie-knife is the same tool, modified to meet the daily wants of civil society. I announce at this table an axiom not to be found in Montesquieu or the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Her Majesty's Library, enable us to follow his movements. On much that is obscurely indicated in scarcely decipherable scrawls, light is thrown by the French memoirs of that age. The names of Madame de Talmond, Madame d'Aiguillon, and the celebrated Montesquieu, are beacons in the general twilight. The memoirs also explain, what was previously inexplicable, the motives of Charles in choosing a life 'in a hole of a rock,' as he said after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748). It is necessary, however, to study ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... pretext of wishing to read some favourite book again, she read aloud, alternately with the abbe, passages from Condillac, Fenelon, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jean Jacques, and even from Montaigne and Montesquieu. These passages, it is true, were chosen beforehand and adapted to my powers. I understood them fairly well, and I secretly wondered at this; for if during the day I opened these same books at random, I found myself brought to a standstill at every line. With the superstition natural ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... nearer to the meaning of one verse, if, as soon as you are puzzled by it, you escape to another, introducing three new words—'law,' 'members,' and 'mind'; not one of which you at present know the meaning of; and respecting which, you probably never will be much wiser; since men like Montesquieu and Locke have spent great part of their lives in endeavouring to explain ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Montesquieu, the author of the "Esprit des Lois," says, "All law comes from the soil," and it has been claimed that residence in the hot climate of the tropics in some measure changes Anglo-Saxon character. It is, therefore, always well in judging national character ...
— My Four Years in Germany • James W. Gerard
... Montesquieu showed that religions served the needs of their adherents and were thus adapted by them to the prevailing civil organization. After comparing Mohammedanism and Christianity he said that the North of Europe adopted Protestantism because it had the spirit of independence ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... philosophy which at that period represented the really living stream of thought. To be a man of enlightenment in those days was to belong to the school of Locke. Locke represented reason, free thought, and the abandonment of prejudice. Besides Locke, he mentions Hume, Montesquieu, Helvetius, Beccaria, and Barrington. Helvetius especially did much to suggest to him his leading principle, and upon country trips which he took with his father and step-mother, he used to lag behind studying Helvetius' De l'Esprit.[216] Locke, he says in an early note ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... her one morning that there were two book-cases in Cesar's room, which enclosed an alcove,—an architectural surprise to her father. Cesarine flung all her girlish savings upon the counter of a bookseller's shop, and obtained in return, Bossuet, Racine, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, Moliere, Buffon, Fenelon, Delille, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, La Fontaine, Corneille, Pascal, La Harpe,—in short, the whole array of matter-of-course libraries to be found everywhere and which assuredly her father would never read. A terrible bill for binding was in the background. The celebrated ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... for the use of their money as is suitable, not only to what can be made by the use of it, but to the difficulty and danger of evading the law. The high rate of interest among all Mahometan nations is accounted for by M. Montesquieu, not from their poverty, but partly from this, and partly from the difficulty of ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... too plain for controversy. It has received the sanction of all the great teachers of political wisdom, from an Aristotle down to a Montesquieu, and from a Montesquieu down to a Burke. It has become, indeed, one of the commonplaces of political ethics; and, however strange the conjunction, it is often found in the very works which are loudest ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... that evidences of any real advance began to appear; for Law's famous scheme (1716-1720) only served as a drag upon the growth of economic truth. But in the middle of the eighteenth century an intellectual revival set in: the "Encyclopaedia" was published, Montesquieu wrote his "l'Esprit des Lois," Rousseau was beginning to write, and Voltaire was at the height of his power. In this movement political economy had an important share, and there resulted the first school of Economists, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... perish from the earth. It placed free England in a position of such moral advantage that within another century the English Idea of political life was able to react most powerfully upon continental Europe. It was the study of English institutions by such men as Montesquieu and Turgot, Voltaire and Rousseau, that gave shape and direction to the French Revolution. That violent but wholesome clearing of the air, that tremendous political and moral awakening, which ushered in the nineteenth century in Europe, had its sources in the spirit which animated the ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... who, with a just confidence, has prefixed to his own history the honorable epithets of political and philosophical, accuses the timid prudence of Montesquieu, for neglecting to enumerate, among the causes of the decline of the empire, a law of Constantine, by which the exercise of the Pagan worship was absolutely suppressed, and a considerable part of his subjects was left destitute of priests, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... manner is not the invariable outcome of noble feeling; and while no man at court had a nobler air than Racine, Corneille looked very much like a cattle-dealer, and Descartes might have been taken for an honest Dutch merchant; and visitors to La Brede, meeting Montesquieu in a cotton nightcap, carrying a rake over his shoulder, mistook him for a gardener. A knowledge of the world, when it is not sucked in with mother's milk and part of the inheritance of descent, is only acquired by education, supplemented by ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Boswell? 'If he had not been a great fool he would not have been a great writer ... he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,' and so forth, in which the shallowness of the analysis of Boswell's character matches the puerile rudeness of the terms. Here again, is a sentence about Montesquieu. 'The English at that time,' Macaulay says of the middle of the eighteenth century, 'considered a Frenchman who talked about constitutional checks and fundamental laws as a prodigy not less astonishing than the learned pig or musical infant.' And he then goes on to describe ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... that, to the latest period of its existence, even under the superintendence of the all-accomplished D'Alembert, it continued to be a scene of the fiercest animosities and the basest intrigues. I might cite Piron's epigrams, and Marmontel's memoirs, and Montesquieu's letters. But I hasten on ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... introduced called "La Reine Pomare." Then there was the "Cancan Eccentrique," introduced by a personage called "La Princesse de Mogador," a feigned name, as you may suppose, assumed by some fille perdue. These dances, commenced at the Chaumiere and the Bal Mabille, were also introduced at the Bal Montesquieu, at the Bal de la Cite d'Antin, and, if I mistake not, at the Bal Valentino. The principal performers were students in law, in medicine, in pharmacy, clerks, commis voyageurs, profligate tradesmen, and lorettes, grisettes, et filles de ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... battalions among the Christians of the north of Greece. And we shall yet see the Australian sweeping before him the indolence of the Birman and the Javanese. This he will owe to the sterility of his fields and the half European blasts of his more salubrious and stringent atmosphere. The maxim of Montesquieu, that "poverty always conquers wealth," solves but half the problem. The true solution is, that the poverty of the soil compels the exertion of a vigour, which severity of climate alone can generate among a people. For three hundred years the population of Jutland and Denmark almost annually ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... neglected wastes of time, Apollo hails his fairest clime, The provinces of mind; An Egypt with eternal towers;[63] See Montesquieu redeem the hours From ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu, was born near Bordeaux, in France, Jan. 18, 1689. For ten years he was president of the Bordeaux court of justice, but it was the philosophy of laws that interested him rather than the administration of them. He travelled over Europe and studied the ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... Montesquieu, in a memorable exclamation, said: "The four great poets, Plato, Malebranche, Shaftesbury, Montaigne!" How true it is of Montaigne! No French writer, including the poets proper, had so lofty an idea of poetry as he had. "From my earliest childhood," ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various |
